


A Taste of Summer

by emeralddarkness



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Short, bucky goes to war, stabs at historical accuracy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 03:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1763843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emeralddarkness/pseuds/emeralddarkness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His favorite, before the war, when he could get it, had been strawberry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Taste of Summer

His favorite, before the war, when he could get it, had been strawberry. It had been a rare treat, reserved mostly for days when he was sure that presently he would melt without something to keep him cool and had managed to scrounge together a spare nickel. On those few occasions he could manage three he would run to the soda fountain and order a Commodore Perry and would share it with Steve, who usually couldn’t afford anything at all. He would eat the strawberry, and Steve the vanilla, and then the two of them would duel with spoons over the French Vanilla, which is to say Steve would have about a spoonful of it until he saw Bucky reach further in, and then he would try to say he didn’t want any more, and after all Bucky had bought it (most often without any help from Steve), until Bucky told him to shut up and eat his ice cream. This happened less and less once the Depression hit, when there were better things to spend spare nickels on, and fewer spare nickels in the first place. Bucky for the most part stopped collecting pennies and started collecting buttons, which you at least had a decent chance of finding and were useful in making clothes stretch and which half the time, as it turned out, cost more than a penny a piece if you bought them new. And besides, he’d decided as he grew up a little, there were kids on the street who needed the pennies more. At least his family had food.

America managed to stagger along for a while after the Stock Market crashed in ’29, but just as things started properly recovering there was the war, and rationing started – sugar rations, processed food rations, and so even when he _had_ money half the time the was nothing to buy. Steve managed, somehow, to get him an entire quart of strawberry ice cream for his birthday in ’43. He wouldn’t tell him how he managed it, and wouldn’t let Bucky share it with him, saying that he’d never liked strawberry nearly as well as Bucky had (which was true), and that it hadn’t really been that hard to get it (which was not). He kept it in the icebox and shaved off thin curls and eaten it slowly, as April turned to May and May turned sweltering. It tasted like summer, and a reminder of bright things, which turned out to be exactly what he needed when he was drafted, after which it got hard to find the bright side to anything. He finished his birthday present the night before he left, and told Steve that when he got back with the war won and rationing no longer a problem he was going to buy him an entire carton of vanilla.

“Just get yourself back, then we can talk about it.” Steve punched him in the arm before he left. “Give that to one of the Nazis for me, will ya?”

He thought of it a lot after being deployed, that last night at home and the taste of strawberries. When they sent him to Italy, where ice cream had been invented in the first place, and he spent two months marching through the countryside with mud in his teeth and nothing to eat day in and day out but spam and beans, if he was lucky and they managed a hot meal at all, it had seemed ironic. But it wasn’t until they found what remained of a strawberry field, with a few berries bright red against the dirt and half-crushed leaves, that he found it was all he could do not to laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd love to hear from you in a review!


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